Top 5 Misconceptions About PPC Marketing

Paid Search Misconceptions

Pay Per Click marketing is one of the most widely used forms of advertising on the internet today and revenues from the medium make up almost 98% of all revenues for the single most powerful company on the web: Google; that’s more than $10 billion dollars for the last fiscal year. Because of this it’s little wonder that PPC is the go-to method when it comes to advertising online as a small or large business.

Despite its popularity and widely known reputation, Pay Per Click advertising still suffers from more than a few popular misconceptions about how it all works. Let’s go over these now.

PPC is Insanely Expensive

This is probably the most common myth of them all and it’s only as true as you want it to be. For one thing, your monthly PPC budget for a Google Adwords campaign can be as small or as large as you want it to be; you can set your monthly spending maximum and have no need to go over it unless you want to. Obviously, how much value you get for your advertising out of your monthly budget can vary greatly but that’s where the second part of the misconception comes into play: PPC is skill based advertising in a certain way and if you select slightly less common but well targeted keywords in a way that matches well with your site content words, you can actually get away with surprisingly low cost per click prices.

Your cost per click can improve even more so if you take into account other value adding factors that can help your campaigns. These include things like creating well-crafted landing pages, increasing the percentage of clicks from your exact target audience and creating a high conversion rate on your sales pages. Each of these will make your click costs lower relative to returns gained.

I have to Deal with Google

Google is the absolute market leader when it comes to PPC advertising, but they are certainly not the only show in town. There are numerous other search systems that offer PPC services. If you aren’t happy with Google’s prices, style or policies you can always go ahead and try the SEM programs offered by Microsoft advertising network. As long as your target audience uses search services other than Google, you have no reason to depend on them completely or at all.

I need to Aim for the #1 Ad position

Many people who are just starting with PPC advertising have the impression that they absolutely need to aim for top spot and make sure they can keep it as long as possible. They associate this with lots of work; money spent and worrying about their ad campaign. The reality is that number #1 is not only not necessary but also actually not as good as lower ad rankings. PPC doesn’t work in exactly the same way as organic search and numerous studies have shown that some of the best click through rate (CTR) comes from ads that are positioned slightly lower down in the third to 6th spots on the ad listings. These positions are also cheaper to aim for.

CTR is King, I Need to Aim for Maximum Click Through Rates

Nope. Click through rates can be a disaster for your ad campaign if your conversion is low. If your website sells dog food and you’ve put together excellent, high CTR ads for horse feed, all those clicks will cost you your entire monthly budget without getting you a single sale (conversion) because the people that spend your money by clicking on each ad are locating something other than what they were looking for.

Concentrate on targeting your exact audience as precisely as possible; formulate your ads and website content so that the people who click your spots are the same ones who want to buy what you offer and do so after clicking. This will give you great success even with relatively low CTR. It will also save you lots of money on your PPC campaigns.

I Can Leave My PPC Campaign on Autopilot

If you set up a PPC campaign, set its monthly budget and let it run only to see that it gives you pretty good results, that is not a good reason to leave it like that. With PPC, you need to adapt to changing consumer behavior in your niche and experiment constantly with new keywords and word combinations to see how you can improve your advertising results all the time. If you don’t do this, you might miss out on even better ad and keyword combinations that give you much better results or you might eventually see your sales drop as search behavior changes within your core market.

A Few Final Words

Running a PPC campaign can seem stressful and confusing at first, but with frequent experimentation, constant self-education and through a process of learning from experience you can indeed run a highly effective and very cost efficient Adwords or other PPC marketing strategy. You might also want to think about hiring expert services in the SEM/PPC field and ask them to run your campaigns for you. This may cost a certain amount of money but it could also save you a fortune in advertising expenses if they happen to be experts in running successful PPC campaigns.

About the author:

Pat Walton has written for the tech industry for over two decades. In that time he has gained a wealth of knowledge on all things technology related. When he’s not writing, you can find Pat reviewing web video companies in Chicago or working on his racquetball skills at his gym.